Monthly Archives: March 2013

Backstory is I started writing it on Thursday night after seeing all the Reader tweetstorm and figured it’s probably of more general interest, so I submitted it there. The original draft was ~1400 words and I wasn’t sure how seriously they take their guideline fo ~800, so just left it at 1400, but turns out they are, in fact, serious. So we edited it down.

For the record (since some people asked), I used Bloglines for as long as I could cope with its downtime, as I always found Google Reader too magic (unpredictable) with its use of Ajax. Eventually Bloglines was outaging for hours and IIRC whole days, so I made the switch to Reader, but could never get into the web app – too much Ajax magic – and instead used Reeder, sync’d to Reader when it came along. When I switched to Android for my primary device, I couldn’t find a satisfactory app, so just used Reeder on the iPad occasionally.

Meanwhile, with podcasts, I preferred the cloud approach of Odeo and Podnova, but both sadly died. I tried podcasts with Reader, but it just wasn’t the right experience so I mostly used iTunes, and then on Android, mixed it up between several apps (DoggCatcher, BeyondPod, PocketCasts, etc…the usual suspects) until eventually creating my own (still in beta). I really had problems with Listen though, so again, no didn’t do the Reader sync.

So bottom line is I did use Reader “somewhat”, but mostly as an API; and it’s no great loss to me like I appreciate it is to others. The responses to this article certainly demonstrate how passionate people are about a product they get to know and love, and use on a daily basis. It’s never easy giving up on muscle memory. The bright side of the equation is exactly what people like about it: RSS and OPML are open, so at least people can move on to Feedly, Newsblur, and so on. And I truly believe this decision ultimately liberates the standard and allows it to thrive among smaller players.

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I received today a question often asked about WebWait, so I’ll answer it here for reference.

WebWait User asks:

I have been using webwait for a while and have a quick question for you. When running multiple calls on the same website, is each call downloading the entire page again, or is the information being loaded from the browser cache?

My answer:

It will do whatever the browser would do if the page was loaded normally, so that would usually mean the 2nd-Nth time it will download from the cache. To counter-act that, you can simply disable your browser cache while performing your tests. Or if you do want to test cache performance, just open your site once (either in the browser or WebWait) and then start the WebWait tests, obviously keeping the cache enabled throughout.

Simple example, but you get the point. It lets you tell the external world what a parameter is all about, but keeps the implementation shorthand. Obviously it’s just a simple example here; parameter names can be much more verbose than just this example and functions can be longer, so you don’t want to keep repeating a long name. For example:

Now you might say “just declare it in the first line”, but I prefer small code and there could be several such lines.

You might say “mention it in a comment”, but I prefer self-documenting code. Comments go out of date and clutter up code. (Strictly speaking, the long name here is a comment, but it’s more likely to be maintained.)

[Update: I don’t often mention Pi, but when I do, it’s on March 14: Pi Day. Thanks to the reader who pointed it out!]

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The URLs below let you manage and revoke permissions you’ve given to third parties via Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s not only useful for security, but also for testing while developing such tools. By deleting the connection, you can see what a user will see the first time they connect.

Mainly writing this because I keep searching for these things and don’t have much luck (as I forgot about MyPermissions). Being personalised URLs, they don’t show up in searches (which is a wasted opporunity, since they are all static and could have just been public placeholders). Hopefully this post will show up in the future when I search for “revoke OAuth Tokens”. You can find links to more of these services on MyPermissions.

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With a long-running script, it’s convenient to see checkpoint log messages indicating what stage it’s at and how long it’s taken.

Most scripts simply run date to show the boring long date format: Fri Mar 29 21:07:39 MST 2002. Info overload! You don’t want to know what month it is, whether you’re in the middle of a weekend, or what timezone you’re in! More to the point, you want to know how much time has elapsed, not what time it is now; you want to know the script’s age.

So here’s a little utility to make it easy. Just call “age” and it will output time since the script began in 00:00:00 format.

I also made another function “announce” which you can use to announce the current function is running. With larger bash scripts, I tend to break them into functions with a list of calls at the bottom; so I can quickly bypass unnecessary crunching by commenting out the call. “announce” makes it easy to see which is running. And if you wanted, you could easily automate announcing for each function…making aspect-oriented Bash the place to be.

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G’Day

Welcome to Michael Mahemoff's blog, soapboxing on software and the web since 2004. I'm presently using HTML5 and the web to make podcasts easier to share, play, and discover at Player FM. I've previously worked at Google and Osmosoft, and built the Ajax Patterns wiki and corresponding book, "Ajax Design Patterns" (O'Reilly 2006).
For avoidance of doubt, I'm not a female, nor ever have been to my knowledge. The title of this blog alludes to English As She Is Spoke, a book so profoundly flawed it reminded me of the maturity of the software industry when this blog began in 2004. I believe the industry has become more sophisticated since then, particularly the importance of UX.
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